Redefining My Relationship to a County

I lived in a county that was not my own for a long time. Naturally, over time my relationship to where I had taken up space in morphed. Assimilating, investing in a city, joining different families and calling them your own was years in the making. Building a life, a career, a skill in the native tongue was the main work of my 20s.

Relocating was a slow fade, a burn that occurred spread over years, after which, I found myself home. Actually home, in California. My California-ness, had been such a marker in my identity as a foreigner.

After going back every summer since officially moving home I find myself on the same ICE train, 528 to Hamburg, year after year. My faithful bicycle, which withstood lonely winters without it’s owner, again road like a dream through dirt paths and cobble stones.

It is foreign and yet home. I no longer live in the stone walls of the city and yet, it is a place I feel often more at home than my birthplace.

In the rolling years, I have learned that the shape a country takes up in myself, and the shape I take up in it, will change, inevitably. There is a freedom in it, being able to roam free and giving a nod to a country on a layover like an old friend.